I've been playing a bit with maps recently and identified a set of low
hanging fruit, that are currently lacking, prohibitive and/or need
improvement. These are great opportunities for those enthusiastic about
maps. Most are rather small, but not enough of a priority for the
foundation to work on.
1. Create a directory of tile providers services that are
opensource/opendata etc..
We seem to have a lot of different tile providers and services
integrated, but we don't really keep track of who does and uses what. There
is a nice
https://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/ that
would be awesome to have as toolforge focused for wikimedia. This can
improve our mutual knowledge of such tile providers. It took me a long time
to get a decent understanding of all the tiles that we have/can use in the
bazillion other tools.
2. Because
http://tools.wmflabs.org/locator/coordinates.php incorporates
google maps and was somewhat broken to begin with, I started experimenting
with a new version:
http://tools.wmflabs.org/locator/coordinates2.php just
for fun. This tool is mostly used by the Dutch Wikimedia community to add
coordinates to their wiki and they really want to keep their satellite
view. It can also be used for en.wikipedia and commons.
There is another tool called
https://tools.wmflabs.org/locator-tool/, which
is specific to Commons. It would be interesting to see if we can generalise
that tool to be more wiki agnostic, using the abstractions that the locator
tool has.
3. I'm working on running an experiment with a gadget on the mobile
website, to see if there can be made a case for stronger mobile web
integration with our new map service
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T174538
4: The JS modules in Kartographer need some love. More support for JS hooks
and promises, will make them much easier to reuse them. For instance, it's
impossible to use the map link or mapframe modules and provide slight
enhancements or integrations, because you can't tell when they have
finished opening etc.
5: Split off Special:NearBy of MobileFrontend and enhance it with
maps.wikimedia.org
6: The list of sidebar services cannot be easily changed right now and is
hardcoded in the extension.
Moving it into a MediaWiki: json file would greatly improve this.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T152971
Ergo, many opportunities, hope this inspires people !!!
DJ